


Flood Watch

by esurientes



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Don't Forget Me, Gen, spoilers for chapter 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-25 23:16:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13845099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esurientes/pseuds/esurientes
Summary: It's not exactly clear how Lora's body gets on the ship.





	Flood Watch

When Jin came to, the cave was choked with ice.

He had been lying prone, unconscious for mere minutes, maybe less. Indoline’s loyalists were still shouting to one another outside, slavering at the chance of finding his core crystal on the battlefield. In that form they would take him to Amalthus, and he could lay numb for years, or be reborn… knowing nothing again, being nothing again, having nothing again.

Jin raised himself to his hands and knees. The ice under him was soaked with blood, and his chest ached fiercely. _Lora._ Lora was in there now. He gagged at the grotesqueness of the realization. What he’d done was so against nature that the Architect himself must be affronted. Jin struggled to his feet and took hesitant steps towards the slab of ice that encased Lora’s body, pressing his hands against the glistening surface.

Her power now coiled within him, and Jin realized with a start that this was no ordinary ice – the _matter_ in this grotto was oddly quiet. This power transcended mere water particles. They had achieved sub-zero; the power to freeze anything! His reflection’s eyes widened.

Concussive blasts rocked the ground, and the shouting grew steadily louder. A hot stab of pain lanced through Jin’s chest. _They are going to sink Torna_. He suddenly, acutely, wanted to take his blade and trace a bloody trail from here to Amalthus himself.

In the end, his power would not reach the Praetor. He would collapse, shivering, his human heart unable to take the strain of one man against an army. In the last days of Torna, Jin would come back to this cave to move Lora to an old Titan battleship.

He could not let her thaw. This had been the grandest ambition of his power to freeze anything, realized at the very moment when their joint power coalesced. He would crystallize even the very thread of his memories – freeze his and Lora’s shared past and keep it safe from the passage of time. How else could he carry on in this flawed world? Drown in the flood of years and lives and stories not his own, and never, ever emerge?


End file.
